Which obviously is wrong, I suspect one of the upgrade scripts may have caused this

Now as a point I cannot remember if this machine was upgraded from dapper, or from edgy, I suspect it may have been dapper which could be the root of the problem, I realise that generally upgrading between releases is not supported but since 6.06 is LTS this may cause a bug when the next LTS comes out so could probably be fixed.

This is also really bad because you lose the TTY in recovery mode as well.

Scott, in your Dapper --> Gutsy upgrade, could you please attach a copy of one of the tty{x} files. I'm trying to figure out which path it takes through the code and I really don't want to install Dapper, then migrate to Gutsy just to find out :)

Experienced the same here on a upgrade from feisty to gutsy.
I had to delete vga=0x317 from my menu.lst and booting without any vga=* option.
Now my ttys are visible again, but I'd like to have them back in 1024x768 (as I have been using them sind dapper) and not in 640x480 (or 800x640) as they are now.